[Footnote 469: 'Hail, darling of the gods, thou happiest spot of earth! hail chosen haunt of beauty's queen! What joy I feel to see you thus again, and tread your shores after so many toils endured in mind and soul! How from my heart by your free gift I cast all anxious cares!'--_Carmina_, &c. p. 84.] Navagero, we are told, composed these verses on his return from a legation to Spain. Born in 1483, he spent his youth and early manhood in assiduous study. Excessive application undermined his health, and Giovio relates that he began to suffer from _atra bilis_, or the melancholy of scholars. The Venetian Senate had engaged him to compose the history of the Republic in Latin; this work was already begun when illness forced him to abandon it. He was afterwards employed in an unsuccessful mission to Charles V. and in diplomatic business at the Court of France. He died at Blois of fever, contracted in one of his hurried journeys. He was only forty-six when he perished, bequeathing to immediate posterity the fame of a poet at least equal to the ancients. In that age of affectation and effort the natural flow of Navagero's verse, sensuous without coarseness and highly coloured without abuse of epithets, raised a chorus of applause that may strike the modern student as excessive. The memorial poems written on his death praise the purity of sentiment and taste which made him burn a copy of Martial yearly to the chaste Muses.[470] One friend calls upon the Nereids to build his tomb by the silent waters of the lagoons, and bids the Faun of Italy lament with broken reeds.[471] Another prophesies that his golden poems will last as many years as there are flowers in spring, or grapes in autumn, or storms upon the sea, or stars in heaven, or kisses in Catullus, or atoms in the universe of Lucretius.[472] [Footnote 470: See the Hendecasyllabics of Johannes Matthæus, _Carmina_, &c. p. 86.] [Footnote 471: Basilius Zanchius, _Carmina_, &c. p. 85.] [Footnote 472: M. Antonius Flaminius, _ib._ p. 85.] A place very close to Navagero might be claimed for Francesco Maria Molsa, a nobleman of Modena, who enjoyed great fame at Rome for his Latin and Italian poetry. After a wild life of pleasure he died at the age of forty-one, worn out with love and smitten by the plague of the Renaissance. The sweetest of his elegies celebrate the charms of Faustina Mancini, his favourite mistress. In spite of what Italians would call their _morbidezza_, it is impossible not to feel some contempt for the polished fluency, the sensual relaxation, of these soulless verses. A poem addressed to his friends upon his sick bed, within sight of certain death, combines the author's melody of cadence with a certain sobriety of thought and tender dignity of feeling.[473] It is, perhaps, of all his compositions the worthiest to live. The following couplets describe the place which he would choose for his sepulchre:--